The network management market in SA is attractive for offshore companies as it is still experiencing growth and is a springboard into Africa, says Entuity co-founder and CTO Rob Haines.
Haines says that unlike the US and Europe, where there are spending delays, the market in SA is still buoyant.
"People are now very much driven by ROI [return on investment], but in the US and Europe, even where there is a case for ROI, spending is still delayed because of corporate budgets."
However, he says the local market is still buoyant.
Entuity, founded in 1997, reported earlier this year that sales in 2002 were almost 20% up on the previous year.
The group, whose flagship product is an out-of-the-box solution that delivers inventory and performance management, problem resolution and service value management, has offices in New York, Boston, Virginia, Los Angeles and London.
"The market has been sustained in SA because people haven`t invested the same amount of money in infrastructure," says Tony Rolston, MD of Network Visibility Solutions, the master distributor for Entuity in SA.
"Telkom and WANs (wide area networks) and so on are expensive, so if there is a case for ROI people are keen."
Haines says the local market is attractive to foreign-based network management groups because it is viable and is also a springboard into the rest of Africa. Outsourcing, as in the rest of the world, is also becoming increasingly important.
Changing industry
According to Haines, the network management industry has experienced major changes in the past few years, particularly as technology has improved.
He says many products were developed when networks were very unreliable. These products include tools to ping routers to check they are up. Many routing protocols were also often implemented incorrectly by vendors, leaving many areas of the network unavailable, so tools were created to see which areas were out.
In addition, WAN links were deployed over copper wire, which brought its own problems.
However, since the late 1990s, routers have uptimes of years and WANs are increasingly connected via fibre cables. With older network monitoring technology, there would have to be 100% failure before the lights go red.
What happens now is that a user may experience a 20% data loss, which makes it impossible to work, even though the network monitor says the network is up. Later analysis then shows there was some kind of network problem.
"The problem is that every user glitch is then seen as a network problem and dumped on the network administrator even if it is not a network problem. So the idea now is to give the network people the tools to see if there is a problem ahead of the user experiencing one."
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